Fixpert

There’s my pup.

The first official meeting doodle on Fixpert.

One of the biggest challenges in my professional life has always been trying to keep up with my workload while spending so much time in meetings. Take a look at the week I just had:

The white areas are time that I have to actually produce work. I tend to work well when I have 3 or more hours sectioned off just to get into a zone and be highly productive. The little 30 - 45 minute chunks between meetings usually don’t amount to much other than catching up on email.

In previous jobs, I used to be able to mark off blocks of time on my calendar as “busy” but I don’t think I’m able to do that at my new job. We’re working in a psuedo agile development style, where we are rapidly producing iterations (of wireframes in this case) and meeting at least once a day to discuss. This process has been super valuable and has resulted in a stronger final product. Less time has been wasted heading down the wrong path, but you can see the danger of losing too much time to meetings in this process.

My recommendation for a User Experience team considering an agile development process would be to emphasize quick (possibly impromptu) meetings that last no more than 30 minutes. We seem to still be caught up in “classic mode” as far as the length of our meetings — minimum 1 hour. If you block off 1 hour, the meeting will take at least 1 hour. Forcing short meetings keeps the conversation moving quickly and on-topic. Shorter meetings also are in the spirit of agile development and ideally leave reasonable chunks of time to get work done.

Has anyone else worked in an agile development environment as an Interaction Designer or Information Architect? Any ideas on battling time lost to meetings?

It’s been a week and two days since I crashed my bike sideways into a minivan and I thought it would be good to give an update. I think I might have cracked or bruised my rib(s) on the left side. When I breath deeply, laugh, cough, or sneeze I have a sharp shooting pain in one very specific spot in in front of the left side of my rib cage. I had kind of noticed it just a little last weekend, but I was taking it so easy and not exercising because I was so beat up that I didn’t really do any deep breathing until the last few days back on the bike again.

Today I rode about 18 miles on PCH on my single speed, which was painful in recovery at the top of the hills (deep breathing). Then right afterwards I ran about 1.5 miles, and that got pretty painful towards the end. Just to explain, I’m training for a short triathlon in September, I had just taken a week off of training after the crash to recover.

So, the chest pain is a bummer. I did hit the guy’s minivan pretty hard, and I took a lot of the impact with my ribs and shoulder so I guess this makes sense. It’s weird, the day of the crash it took a while for things to start to hurt, but I was kind of running on adrenaline for a while, it was later the afternoon of the hit that I started getting achey, and really it was like Day 3 that I was really hurting.

Anyway, from the reading I’m doing online, doctors can’t really do anything about cracked ribs anyway other than give you pain relievers, so at least I’ll save money on a medical bill. It’s not that bad, just don’t say anything funny (”haha OW! Oh god!”).

Peachpit Press’s upcoming book Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices by Dan Saffer is due to hit the shelves August 2006. It looks like it’s going to be a great read for both junior and senior-level Interaction Designers and Information Architects.

Here is a nice excerpt that made me chuckle:

Interaction design as a formal discipline has been around for less than two decades. It’s a young field, still defining itself and figuring out its place among sister disciplines such as information architecture (IA), industrial design (ID), communication (or graphic) design (CD), user—experience (UX) design, user—interface engineering (UIE), human—computer interaction (HCI), usability engineering (UE), and human factors (HF).

I like this quote because it demonstrates how confusing things can get with so many titles and acronyms floating around — especially when drafting your resume or conducting a job search.

This book contains a number of interviews with experts from the field of Interaction Design, including Larry Tesler, Luke Wroblewski, and Adam Greenfield. Check out some of excerpts from these interviews on the Designing for Interaction book’s web site.